ck the vision.

{xxii}

II

But the very characteristics of mystical religion which give it its
self-evidence and power at the same time mark limits to its scope and
range. It is and must be primarily and essentially first-hand
experience, and yet it is an experience that is by no means universal.
It is not, so far as we can see from the facts at hand, an experience
which attaches to the very nature of consciousness as such, or indeed
one which is bound to occur even when the human subject strains forward
all the energies of his will for the adventure, or when by strict
obedience to the highest laws of life known to him he _waits_ for the
high visitation. Some aspect is involved over which the will has no
control. Some other factor is implied besides the passion and the
purity of the seeking soul. The experience "comes," as an inrush, as
an emergence from the deeper levels of the inner life, but the glad
recipient does not know how he secured the prize or how to repeat the
experience, or how to tell his friend the way to these "master moments"
of blessedness.

There are numerous persons who are as serious and earnest and
passionate as the loftiest mystical saint, and who, in spite of all
their listening for the inner flow of things, discover no inrushes,
feel no invasions, are aware of no environing Companion, do not even
feel a "More of Consciousness conterminous and continuous with their
own." Their inner life appears impervious to divine bubblings. The
only visitants that pass over the threshold of their consciousness are
their own mental states, now bright and clear, now dim and strange, but
all bearing the brand and mark of temporal origin. This type of
experience must not, therefore, be insisted on as the only way to God
or to the soul's homeland. Spiritual religion must not be put to the
hazard of conditions that limit its universality and restrict it to a
chosen few. To insist on mystical experience as the only path to
religion would involve an "election" no less inscrutable and {xxiii}
pitiless than that of the Calvinistic system--an "election" settled for
each person by the peculiar psychic structure of his inner self.[9]

There is another limitation which must always attach to religion of the
purely mystical type. In so far as it is an _experience_ of the inward
type, it is indescribable and incommunicable. That does not mean or
imply any lessened value in the experience itself, it only means